Latest Contact Center Best Practices

According to Dimension Data’s recent Contact Center benchmarking report, digital channels (email, web chat, social media, SMS text, video chat), which currently account for roughly 35% of contact centers’ total interactions, are expected to overtake voice within the next two years. The catalyst?—the widespread adoption of Internet-connected mobile devices. Consider the following: by 2018, Cisco predicts that the number of mobile devices used by consumers will grow close to 8 billion.

According to Dimension Data’s recent Contact Center benchmarking report, digital channels (email, web chat, social media, SMS text, video chat), which currently account for roughly 35% of contact centers’ total interactions, are expected to overtake voice within the next two years. The catalyst?—the widespread adoption of Internet-connected mobile devices. Consider the following: by 2018, Cisco predicts that the number of mobile devices used by consumers will grow close to 8 billion.

Continued Implementation of Self-Service: Recent studies have shown 67% ofcustomers prefer self-service over speaking to a live representative, which has its benefits when considering self-service interactions are 200-300% less expensive than those handled by a live agent. While the use of live agents is not expected to decrease, the importance and extended use of self-service is likely to be a continued theme next yar.

Growing Deployment of Cloud Infrastructures: By 2015, cloud computing spending is projected to reach 155 billion, compared to 46.4 billion in 2008. And according to DMG Consulting, cloud-based infrastructure is the fastest growing area for the call center industry, predicted to almost double between 2013 and 2015. When compared to premise-based solutions, contact centers based in the cloud have experienced 27% reduction in annual contact center costs and a 35% improvement in uptime. Offering superior reliability, scalability, and cost-savings, cloud adoption shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon and likely to continue its successes in 2014 well into 2015 and beyond.

Technologies follow interesting twists and turns along the adoption curve. It often proves most of the experts wrong, if not relative to how it gets adopted, certainly relative to the timing of its adoption.

Take WebRTC for example. The telecom industry has been talking about the technology for a number of years and a number of vendors have illustrated interesting use cases that leverage its benefits. And yet today, the only places where we find its actual use are in residential applications like Google’s ChromeCast. With the introduction of the "Mayday" button on their high-end tablets, Amazon made some waves in the WebRTC andcontact center worlds, but it is unclear how many people actually use this capability to call Amazon. So even though it solves a number of business problems and helps carriers introduce new services that help them compete more effectively, the technology is still stuck in the demo phase as far as productive business applications are concerned.